Hello and welcome to the 5th MTA Friday Brief of October. There is lots of news around Brexit to bring you but we also have a wide range of other information, so there should be something for everyone this week.
We start this week with a follow-up from our new forecasts that were released last week. The recording of the webinar is now available to MTA members to view at https://www.mta.org.uk/members-area/mta-forecast-documents - you will need your username and password to login to access these files. Please remember that this is a valuable member service, so please don’t share this link outside of your company.
The news this week is dominated by a range of updates on the various issues around Brexit. We have produced a guide to using the new UKCA mark which is replacing the CE mark in Great Britain (but not Northern Ireland) - this will be a live document which we will update over the next few weeks. We also have separate stories with updates on importing goods into the UK and providing services to the European Union, the new immigration rules that are coming into force and a range of other updates and reminders around VAT, apprenticeships and using mobile phones in Europe.
In another update from last week, the webinar on the Lloyds Bank International Trade Portal is available to view and we provide the slides from the presentation to download.
MTA Associate member Atlantic Technologies is hosting the 3rd in their series of free webinars demonstrating their Salesforce and Tableau and details can be found in the article below.
Last week, the UK and Japan signed their Economic Partnership Agreement and we take a look at what this will mean for trade between the two countries. On this theme, the organisers have provided an update on JIMTOF 2020 which is being held on-line this year.
The technical news this week includes details of a new work proposal for a standard for powder life cycle management in additive manufacturing. We also have an update on progress with umati - the universal machine technology interface – that is being led by our colleagues in Germany at VDW and VDMA.
The economic news this week takes a quick look at the flash PMI numbers published last week which show differing trends for the UK, Euro-zone and USA around the general theme of recovery. We also have the latest output from the European Commission’s Economic Sentiment Index which looks to have paused overall although confidence in the industry sector continues to improve.
We have a couple of news items on the general theme of skills. To encourage more students to pursue engineering as a career, MTA member Renishaw is hosting a webinar for school children and parents as part of This is Engineering Day and you can get details of how to access this in the story below. Also, our colleagues at CECIMO are organising a webinar on “Closing the Skills Gap in Manufacturing” as a partner activity of the EU Vocational Skills Week 2020.
With best wishes from everyone in the MTA Team, we bid you farewell for now. Stay safe, whichever level of lockdown you might be in, and we will be back next Friday with more news and information for the manufacturing technologies sector.
